Microsoft and the Xbox One Could Still Have Kept Its Vision

Microsoft Doesn’t Have to Abandon Their Vision with the Xbox One.

Literally days after posting my article on how Sony and the Playstation 4 are choosing to preserve gaming culture, Microsoft decided to do a one-eighty reversing all of their DRMpolicies. Although this reversal is overall a good thing for gamers worldwide, it does limit their vision. They had grand ideas of an all digital world, where your game library was stored to the cloud and accessible from any Xbox One. They also had a game share idea where you could give your friends and family members access to games in your cloud. Although these ideas were cool, it did force that incessant daily check in with their servers, causing problems for people who have very unstable connections. I personally think Microsoft could have pulled it off, if only they had taken a different approach.

3G Cards Are Cheap! Why Doesn’t The Xbox One Have Them?

Amazon, with their Kindle, offers free 3G for its users to download books. Although, the upfront costs for Amazon are high, the potential book sales that come from having a device always connected offsets those costs. The question must be asked, why didn’t Microsoft just add a 3G card into all Xbox One‘s? 3G chips inside cell phones are incredibly cheap, we have been mass producing them for years, to add them to each console would add very little to production cost. This would appease the masses, because although rural areas lack fast internet, most area’s, even third world countries, have cell phone towers. The data required to ping Microsoft’s servers would only be kilobits. The cost Microsoft would have to pay would be so incredibly minimal that they could easily offset it with Xbox Live subscription profits. Some may be concerned that the 3G chips could create privacy concerns, but remember, all of our phones have the same technology, and we aren’t up in arms about that.

Microsoft should still allow people to opt-in.

We can’t dwell on what could have been, let’s look to the future with the Xbox One. The fact of the matter remains that many of the ambitious ideas Microsoft had with their console don’t need to be abandoned. There are still many among us that have great internet connections and don’t mind the 24 hour server ping. Maybe with your Xbox Live Gold subscription, Microsoft could allow its users to opt into many of these cloud features. They could still move forward in their vision, and have people opt in once the internet infrastructure in their areas improve. They shouldn’t have to fully concede their vision just because the Playstation 4 made some direct attacks.

Messy Marketing | Microsoft needs to present things clearly

During E3, the most frustrating part of Microsoft’s press conference was the lack of an explanation on some of the key features they wanted to implement with the Xbox One. Sure, it was awesome that they dedicated so much time to games, but it wouldn’t have hurt in the slightest to take out five minutes to explain everything in easy-to-understand english. In choosing not to discuss any of the concerns made them seem disingenuous and as if they had something to hide. What came after was a hodgepodge of different executives saying different things to different journalists. The messaging became even more confusing, and only made them look pretentious. You counter their messaging with Sony’s, where everything was very clear, upfront, and earnest, it was easy for the PS4to capture the imaginations of the viewing audience. Whenever Microsoft has another Xbox One conference, they must go out of their way to make things as clear as absolutely possible.

Are you guys hoping that Microsoft will still implement many of the cloud features with the Xbox One? Sound off below.